Review: App for BMTC's Buses, Bangalore

This is a discussion on Review: App for BMTC's Buses, Bangalore within Commercial Vehicles, part of the BHP India category; The BMTC app was featured in local print media, they claim it is buggy but I think for now we ...

The BMTC app was featured in local print media, they claim it is buggy but I think for now we should just look at the positives and ignore those issues, hopefully there will be an update coming soon with the fixes for the bugs.

Guess what?. This system is already in place in our small town Udupi. Here, private city bus operators are issuing RFID passes for almost 3 years now. This is for daily commuters who will get concessional rates. They have to recharge their passes once in a month. The conductor in the bus has a ticket printing machine which also scans these passes, deducts the exact fare for the trip and prints out the slip showing balance money in the account. This is extremely useful in city buses as neither passengers nor the conductor has to search for exact change.
Not just this, a few years ago, private bus operators in Udupi, Mangalore region had started an announcement system in their buses. This system had some sort of GPS connection (I guess) and could tell exactly which bus stop is approaching (something similar to what we see in some trains). The system was very accurate. They also had plans to generate some income through advertisement. Sadly they stopped it after few months for some reasons. If a small town bus operators can implement high end technologies like these, why cant the BMTC or metros?

It is not a question of affordability, brother. It is the question of admissibility.

For a private operator or a group of fleet owners, it is a straight path to implement any system they wish to. At most, the proposal is to be approved by the promoter / proprietor / board of directors.

The approach is entirely different and lengthy, when it comes to state owned corporations. Implementing a very basic change such as introducing a new tyre vendor takes years to materialize.

One much appreciate the proactive measures taken by KSRTC to adopt latest in technology. No wonder KSRTC still remains the best state owned bus operator in the country.

The BMTC app was featured in local print media, they claim it is buggy but I think for now we should just look at the positives and ignore those issues, hopefully there will be an update coming soon with the fixes for the bugs.

Totally agree. From my experience over the last week, key thing I have noticed is that they still have not got all the buses online on the network-especially some heavily used ones like the 500CA that runs from Banashankari to ITPL. The other thing that I noticed is that the route number to bus mapping was wrong in a few cases. They need to rectify these things.

In general I think the article in the print media is poorly written. I don't think it is 'Full of Bugs' as the author has written.

For Example:

The whole point of this option is that it can be used for folks who know the route number. For those who do not, the Trip Planner is the way to go. And statement on stopping or not stopping does not make sense.As far as I know, we do not have any limited stop or express services.

Again, don't think the author understands the feature. The purpose is to show all buses near a stop, from there you can select the route that you want. Useful because I may not know all the routes in the area- Or I may know but do not want to check 1 by 1, so use this option to see all active buses and then go to the route.

Overall, there are some design elements that could have been better. These can be easily worked around once one knows how it behaves. The key thing BMTC has to do is to ensure all buses and routes are online and enabled and also ensure the bus to route mapping is accurate.